It is not every year one has
the opportunity to see two different productions of Strauss’s penultimate
opera, still – still! – never staged by either the Royal Opera or ENO. Before
the Deutsche Oper’s revival earlier this year, I had indeed only seen Die Liebe der Danae once in the theatre
before, also in Salzburg, in Günter Krämer’s 2002 production. I can only wish
that Krämer’s production had been revived, for, despite its faults, its Salzburg
successor from Alvis Hermanis is truly atrocious.

At best, it is a total waste of
money (and bizarrely, given the golden subject matter, a non-ironic one). The
sets and costumes look – and surely must have been – very expensive indeed, the
dimensions of Midas’s hut threaten to have Franco Zeffirelli, surely the
unacknowledged progenitor of Hermanis’s ‘aesthetic’, seem a model of modesty in
his garretted vision for La bohème;
indeed, we veer dangerously close to Zeffirelli-Turandot-land (far from coincidentally, as we shall have cause to
discover).If the very occasional
image, notably the portrayal of the shower of gold through dancers, augurs
well, everything else is empty indeed. Chorus members wear individualised giant
– and yes, I mean ‘giant’ – turbans. Why? Who knows? No one even seems to care.
A still-more-giant elephant is wheeled on and off the stage. At the beginning
of the third act, someone walks a real donkey on and off the stage in bizarre hommage to Francesca Zambello’s Carmen, or maybe not. Nothing seems to
have any meaning. There is a total lack of interest – truly extraordinary in
our own times – in the dramatic meaning and possibilities of temptation by and
rejection of gold. Nor, unlike in Krämer’s production – which took us from the
period of 1944 dress rehearsal, through 1952 for the first production, also of
course in Salzburg, to its own time –is
there any interest whatsoever shown in genesis and reception. This opera needs
help to release its myriad of musical riches; it receives none; indeed, none is
so much as attempted in a lengthy essay in – at best – vacuity.

Danae (Krassimira Stoyanova) with dancers (gold)

In a valiant attempt to defend or
at least to skate over Hermanis’s indefensible, dramaturge Ronny Dietrich
writes: ‘This blend of the traditional with the fictitious … has induced Alvis
Hermanis to stage Die Liebe der Danae
as a fairy tale, especially as the opera’s storyline takes us to the Orient.
Even if the libretto mentions Syria as the country in which the encounter
between god and man, i.e. Jupiter and Midas, took place, Alvis Hermanis prefers
not to commit himself to any location or period in his production.’ It is not,
on a moment’s reflection, so valiant after all (and I have checked the original
German, lest the words were mistranslated). Why is a ‘fairy tale’ ‘especially’
suited to ‘the Orient’. Did Edward Said, let alone any of his successors, never
exist? And why is a fairy tale somehow held to be devoid of meaning, of all
manner of implications, psychological, social, political, cultural…?

The claim that no location is
committed to is at best questionable. Why, then, do we see, for no obvious
reason, that most noble passage in the whole opera – the interlude depicting ‘Jupiter’s
resignation’ – ruined by a procession on stage of women in burqas? Well, I say
burqas, but, in contrast with the expensive if vulgar designs for everything
else, they are simply white sheets: childish, if one were to be charitable, but
more likely deliberately insulting? We return to Hermanis. Now notorious for
his anti-migrant
outbursts – one of his most staggering, brazenly untruthful, brazenly
racist claims having been ‘While not all refugees
are terrorists, all terrorists are refugees or their children’ – I think we can
hazard a guess why he might wish to hold to ridicule Muslim women, in a setting
that is anything but non-specific, whatever Dietrich might claim. Likewise why
Hermanis might depict ‘the Orient’ – have we really not moved on from that? Yes,
we, of course, have – with an
essentialism shading between ludicrous and sinister. There is no reason
whatsoever for those women to have trekked on stage at all, setting up shop
with looms in Midas’s bafflingly large tent; Dietrich offers the claim that carpets,
‘which epitomise the oriental topos’ (we are long past the time to stop digging)
establish ‘a connection to the genesis of the opera – a process of intertwining
and interweaving themes and motifs’. You could have fooled me. Hermanis’s
recent interview with Der Standard,
in which he defiantly nails his ‘conservative’ – for which, we can read something
a little more than that – credentials to the mast tell us, sadly, much more
about what has been going on. Why theatres continue to hire someone whose
directorial skills are as impressive as his politics is beyond me – more so than
ever, given the results of this production.

We had, then, to
rely on the singing for anything in the way of enjoyment or edification. It is
just as well that much of it was very good indeed. I doubt that the role of
Jupiter has ever been better sung than it was by Tomasz Konieczny; his was a towering, tireless performance, as
impressive in its moments of tenderness as of godly pride. Krassimira Stoyanova’s
Danae was, for the most part, beautifully sung, in an evidently heartfelt
assumption. Both singers showed themselves excellently matched in that glorious
final duet. Gerhard Siegel’s musical and verbal skill was never in doubt, but I
was not always entirely convinced that the voice of an excellent Mime offered a
plausible Midas challenge to our Wotan-Jupiter. Norbert Ernst made for a lively
Merkur and Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke once again proved himself a fine
singing-actor as Pollux. Jupiter’s wives – what to say about their painted-on
nipples, another Orientalist ‘fantasy’? – struck me as an altogether superior
collection of consorts. Mária Celeng, Olga Bezemertna, Michaela Selinger, and
Jennifer Johnston worked so well together, both individual of voice and indeed
of character, and yet also cohesive as a vocal quartet, that I longed to hear
more from them: a spin-off, please.

That leaves us to consider the
orchestra and the conductor. Franz Welser-Möst, lavishly praised by Hermanis in
that Standard interview, conducted
somewhat stiffly for much of the evening. If Hermanis thinks, as he claims,
that Welser-Möst is an aural equivalent of ‘strong LSD’, he needs to find himself
a new dealer. When the conductor relaxed, when he let the music yield a little
more, the Vienna Philharmonic came more into its own. There is much more to
this score in terms of harmony, colour, a myriad of orchestral melody than we
heard here, though. It was not only Hermanis’s fault that the aforementioned ‘Jupiter’s
resignation’, one of the most moving orchestral passages in all of Strauss’s
operas, went for so little.

3 comments:

Oh come on. This is Salzburg in August. The most in your face opulent festival for the in your face rich anywhere in Europe. The very name Grosses Festspielhaus tells you that you are unlikely to encounter anything remotely approximating to Brechtian Episches Theater, rather the opposite. Best to just close your eyes and listen to the music. After all, those slumbering in the parkett will probably be less concerned about Hermanis' political opinions than whether the ostentation on the stage does not outshine their own.

I'm afraid that is not a characterisation of Salzburg I accept. Especially since Gerard Mortier took over, but before then too, it has been home to all manner of intelligent drama and music-making. This is where Herheim directed Die Meistersinger and, perhaps more brilliantly still, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, where Claus Guth directed the best Figaro production I have ever seen; it is where Boulez conducted Moses und Aron. I didn't mention Brecht, and didn't expect a Brechtian reading, interesting though that might have been. That does not mean that we should be subjected to a production of outright racism.

I didn't know about Hermanis's anti-migrant views, though I might have guessed. That puts Salzburg's decision to invite him back beyond the pale, but in any case they must have been nuts to do so after the Gawain - John Tom is on record as pointing out how the director told the singers he didn't want them as the design would carry it.

I love the opera itself, and remember fondly what Garsington achieved with it, but the Salzburg evening actually made me feel unwell - praise be, then, to a good walk the next day and The Exterminating Angel, which actually held up a mirror to the decadent audience (not nearly so bad in the Haus fuer Mozart.